Game Setup
Perhaps you were looking for advanced settings or about the game world?
Installation
FUEL was sold in the following flavors:
X360, PS3 & PC CD/DVD install should be straight-forward. (IE: Everything you need to install should already be on the disc). However, you may need to download/run some patch files to get the game up-to-date after install.
The game is playable in both single-player/solo and online/multi-player:
- PS3 version used GameSpy, which has been discontinued
- X360 & PC used Games For Windows Live (GFWL).
FUEL on PC (Steam) Install
Note: It’s highly recommended to use the Steam Guide method further below to neuter GFWL from FUEL, b/c almost all issues with FUEL on PC are caused by GFWL. — HappyHamster
Problem: After installing FUEL from Steam, you can see the setup screen, but when you try to run the game either nothing happens or you get a pop-up saying:
Cause: When Codemasters listed and supported FUEL on Steam it would auto-install GFWL when you installed the game. But, when Microsoft announced GFWL was retiring Codemasters patched GFWL out of their popular games while simply delisting less popular ones like FUEL. This means titles like FUEL still need GFWL installed to play. Unfortunately, when you install FUEL from Steam now the GFWL won’t auto-install.
- Start the FUEL Launcher
- Click «Games For Windows Live» button
- GFWL should install itself
The GFWL client that shipped with FUEL doesn’t work in Win 10, but the last version you can download from Microsoft’s old GFWL site does. So, you’ll need to download and install it from http://www.xbox.com/en-IE/Live/PC/DownloadClient.
FUEL — Games For Windows Live (GFWL) Local Profile Setup
Problem: GFWL asks you to login when FUEL starts.
Solution: You don’t need an online account to play. You can create a local profile.
- Start game
- On GFWL pop-up, select «Create Profile»
- Scroll down, and click «create local profile» link
- Enjoy
You can also set up GFWL to auto-login a profile. You can also log your profile out, and create other local profiles to either experiment around or let other family and friends run their own race career w/o screwing yours up.
Problem: Game freezes on FUEL logo, and white «processing» circle icon doesn’t spin like it’s supposed to. Atl-tabbing shows an error pop-up saying something about resource issues, and see WinLiveNetPlayerManager_Z as part of error message.
Cause: MS’ updates to Win 10 seem to completely bork GFWL for some FUEL players now (EG: Win 10 1903). Game hangs trying to run GFWL.
Solution: Neuter GFWL from FUEL via following guide:
Guide has a download for alternate xlive.dll & xlive.ini files you can put directly in your FUEL install folder, which bypasses GFWL in FUEL. (Essentially, you can start FUEL w/o GFWL starting.) Without GFWL running, you can’t do online multi-player. But, since GFWL online MP was shut off long ago, who cares.
Video Options
FUEL’s startup loader lets you set Video Options. Some work. Some don’t.
- Resolution . (works and is self-explanatory). Setting a higher resolution has a greater impact on FPS performance, but also has the greatest impact on visual appearance of any other option available.
- Anti-aliasing . (doesn’t work) The «fx.phl» shader file has code for anti-aliasing, but it doesn’t work. (you can literally delete those functions out of the file, and the shaders will still compile). However, you can use your graphics card’s control panel set some. (See «Advanced Setup» section below).
- Texture Quality . (doesn’t work). Texture quality is controlled via the shader files. There are high-res textures stored in the DPC archives. FUEL runs them through the shaders that have a compression routine. This effectively reduces texture size by 1/2 (lower-res). This code is branched to allow compression or not allow it.
- Anisotropic (Filtering) . (doesn’t work). Playing with the options in the setup loader does nothing. You can set this via your graphics card’s control panel, though.
- Advanced:Lets you select / deselect shader maps to use:
- Normal Maps . Makes some textures better, eg: certain vehicles will have better tire textures (bump mapping), and show panel damage when banged around too much.
- Dirt Maps: When enabled, your vehicle gets progressively muddier when running off-road, and cleaner when running through water. Your screen borders also get progressively caked in dirt and cleaned off.
- (Ambient) Occlusion Maps: Provides some extra shading around objects to give them more depth/realism. Ambient Occlusion tends to have a pretty big FPS hit on older systems in some games.
- Shadow Maps: Dynamically generates shadows from objects based on the movement of the sun.
Optional Graphical Enhancements
There’s a few external things you can install to FUEL to help punch give you more options to graphical goodness.
FUEL: RESHADED is a mod that re-works the FUEL shaders to clean them up, optimize them a bit, add on/off switches to the most common things folks like turning on/off (eg: bloom, dynamic eye adapt), and adds some enhancements (eg: rain sheen to make things wet when it rain, darker nights, etc).
- Download the .zip file
- Go to your FUEL game install folder
- Go to «shaders» folder
- Save your old shaders if you want (eg: make an «old» sub-folder to toss them into, or zip them up into a file called «oldshaders.zip» or something)
- Unzip the FUEL: RESHADED shaders into the shaders folder. (Tell it to overwrite the old shaders if they’re still in the shaders folder)
- Open the «_setup.h» file if you want to tweak options.
A lot of the new features are already baked-in, like rain sheen effects. Others you can tweak, like enhanced shadows.
ReShade is an ENB-like shader injector that works with FUEL. You can get it to work with FUEL via the following:
- Download the latest reshade .exe file from the site
- Run it .. it’ll start listing games .. DON’T pick FUEL.exe
- Instead, click «browse»
- Go to your FUEL game install folder
- Select «SecuLauncher.exe»
- Select DirectX / D3D 9 as graphics type game uses
- Select shader artist files to install (can just let it install defaults for now)
- ReShade will download and save the shader files to FUEL folder
- Close ReShade when it says it’s done
- Launch FUEL
- You should see a ReShade overlay letting you look at a tutorial on how to use it, and checkboxes to activate different shaders. Pressing «HOME» key will show / hide ReShade menu. Mess around and see which shaders you like using. (EG: LumaSharpen is a cheap sharpening post-procesiing shader. Technicolor2 shader adds even more color to the game.)
If you don’t see the ReShade menu when you start the game, or if the game crashes.
- Re-run ReShade.exe
- Make sure you select «browse» and pick «SecuLauncher.exe» for FUEL
- Try selecting DirectX / D3D 10 and let Reshade finish.
- Then launch the game. It should start up w/o showing the reshade menu.
- Exit the game.
- Rerun reshade.exe, and now select DirectX / D3D 9 again.
- Let Reshade finish it’s setup.
- Rerun FUEL (preferably by running SecuLauncher.exe directly, not GameSetup.exe)
- You should get the reshade overlay now.
(Not sure why, but when I initially setup FUEL with DX9 in reshade, it crashed. Then I tried DX10, and it ran but w/o reshade. When I set it back to DX9, it ran reshade overlay fine. So, it’s like doing that helps get reshades injector working in FUEL for some reason.)
Good shaders to try out in ReShade:
- Bloom . Disable FUEL’s Bloom using FUEL: RESHADED or FUEL: REFUELED, then enable one of the bloom shaders in ReShade. Some bloom the entire scene (even the UI) while others are less heavy-handed. Most have the ability to control how much bloom they provide, so you can mess around with them.
- SMAA . Subpixel Morphological Anti-Aliasing. AA helps smooth out jaggies on edges of objects. The best way to lower jaggies is to increase screen resolution. But, even at 1920×1080, SMAA helps smooth out more jaggies. In ReShade, move this to the top of the shader processing list, so it will smooth out jaggies before other shaders, like Sharpening, try to add more detail.
- Sharpening . Some of FUEL’s textures are low-res / smudgy. LumaSharpening, Filmic Sharpening or Anamorphic Filmic Sharpening shader will help make them look higher-def. Even with video set to 1920×1080, a sharpening shader will make the game look 2K. Make this run after any Anti-aliasing, so the AA can straighten up jaggies before they get sharpened / enhanced.
- Technicolor2.fx . disable FUEL: RESHADED’s «color saturation» post-processing effect, and try using ReShade’s Technicolor2 shader instead. Punches up the colors and provides more control over how much. (There’s other shaders that provide saturation, contrast, etc control. Technicolor2 just has defaults where you can immediately notice the difference without having to mess around with it.)
- Curves . This adds faux HDR (High Dynamic Range) lighting, where it tries to provide more difference between colors to help the scene pop. FUEL has an HDR algorithm in the post-processing shader, but this can help «unwash» the scene a bit more.
Shaders that don’t seem to work with FUEL:
- EyeAdaptation.fx . Reshade has a dynamic eye adaptation shader, but it doesn’t seem to work with FUEL. So, can’t disable FUEL’s to swap out for it.
- Ambient Occlusion .. Reshade as a Screen-Space AO and a MXAO (?) shaders. They don’t seem to work with FUEL.
Fuel please use the games for windows live launcher
UPDATE 6/4/2016: I’ve added a bit of info on how to restore your old savegame. Take a look at the «How to change your name» part of the guide.
UPDATE 2/19/2016: I’ve re-uploaded the mirros and provided a VirusTotal scan [www.virustotal.com] .
I just tried to play one of my favorite racing games (FUEL) and noticed that the game crashes whenever I try to sign into GFWL. Interestingly enough the game works if I don’t sign into GFWL and I can play just as I normaly would, though I can’t save my game!
This is a huge problem, especially in a big open world game like FUEL, no one wants to start over every time, so I’ve looked for a fix and found one.
In order to get FUEL working again you need to download two files called ‘xlive.dll’ and ‘xlive.ini’, they’re in the archive called ‘xlive less_20140518_v2.7z’/FUEL_savegame_fix, which you can open with WinRar or 7zip.
As mentioned before, use WinRar or 7zip to extract the contents of the archive. Both files need to be copied into your FUEL folder, for me this is in ‘Steam\steamapps\common\FUEL’.
When you have done that, then you’re pretty much done, start your game, play it, and save it as you would normally. Everything should be working now, the game should start up and be fully playable in Single-Player and saving should work just as intended.
No more signing in to GFWL, no more updates, just playing a good game, totally unhindered by GFWL!
There’s something else you should do though, so keep reading!
One last thing you might want to do is change your name, othwerwise it will be set as ‘Player1’. This also goes for restoring your old savegames.
Go into your FUEL folder and open your ‘xlive.ini’ with a text editor.
You’ll find the following code:
Signin = 1
UserName = Player1
XUID = 0xE0000000DEADBEEF
Change the ‘Player1’ into whatever you want to and save it, now, if you want to restore you old savegame then you need to use the same name that you used for your old profile. If you used GFWL, then you need to use the same name here.
Savegames are saved in «\Documents\My Games\FUEL» folder. There should be a folder that has the same name as your username. For example, if your GFWL username was «Bunny2cute4u» then you need to use this name in your xlive.ini as well. Now, if you’ve used this mod before, then you need to use the same name that you used the last time.
If you’ve done everything I said, then the game should work fine now, you should be able to save and best of all, no more GFWL. From what I can see you’re not able to play multiplayer but that function may be added soon. The same two files might also work for other GFWL games, so if you have a game that needs GFWL to run/save then go ahead and try it!
Credits: I’ve found the files in <ССЫЛКА УДАЛЕНА>this thread! It was uploaded by the user ‘ virusek ‘ who is probably the creator.
Disclaimer: If I have made typos, explained something wrong or if the credits are invalid, please feel free to correct me, I’ll edit the guide accordingly. If requested I can add pictrues for each step, but I’m not sure that’s really needed since it’s fairly easy to do.
Thank you for reading this guide and I hope everything I explained here works for you, now go off and have fun in FUEL!